


Galanthus

by CypressSunn



Series: One Hundred and One Shots [11]
Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic, Family Dynamics, Fluff, M/M, Preteen melodrama, Solarpunk, but in SPACE!, committed relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 19:31:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17689487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/pseuds/CypressSunn
Summary: “Well, there’s no accounting for intrinsic biological variabilities,” Prax promises.Amos simply nods along, satisfied in all he did not need to understand.





	Galanthus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [entwashian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/entwashian/gifts).



The _P. Contorta II_ was a designated relief class cruiser. A retrofitted Earther design showing in its bulkier, less streamlined hull. According to its reg papers it had been a pleasure trawler before the advent of the Epstein Drive, thus explaining its need for only the most minimal crew as well as its capabilities of taking on decent paying contracts. It had been auctioned off second hand and then sold again. Renamed the _Kingston IV_ , before it was _Winderveld & Co. _ , then _The Rocksteady Samurai_ , _Orion’s Onion_ , _Ark of Joseph Smith_ , _The Big Johnny_ , _Marshall Grant Ogunye_ , _Leaky Teaky,_ and most unfortunately, the _Steel Hard Seamen._ Passed from contractor to subcontractor, from family gigs to partnerships before finally settling into the hands of the Burton/Meng collaboration.

But if the truth be told, beneath the shell of the ship’s non-manufacturer sanctioned customizations was the gutted remains of the last Earther gunboat left adrift and unaccounted for in the outskirts of the Great Interplanetary War. Not that any of it was provable, all heresy entirely. And who would dream to say otherwise? Less than legitimate salvage record or not, Prax knows Amos would break the arms of anyone who dared malign the rightful ownership of his beloved _Contorta_.

* * *

“It’s gonna be nothing but Prax Panels from wall to wall, stem to stern,” Amos had promised over the schematics. He had taken Mei by the hand and showing her every crook of the ship, tracing out space for water conduits and soil cycle drums. It had all felt too good to be true, to leave Ganymede, to find Amos again. Too turn an old clunker with scattered and scavenged up grades into a garden.

And yet, years later, Prax stood in that promised a jungle as they fell through space.

The herbage nearest the cargo areas varied the most; from ultra blue to a flush yellowing hue, every stem and stamen hanging from the walled panels faring differently in the low artificial light supply. Prax spent equal measure examining the foliage as he did checking the secures on the cargo.

They were ferrying some Ceres machinist’s special order from Callisto. It had been love at first sight for Amos; the tools and toys leaving him slackjawed and amazed. Ever the greasehead, ever the mechanic. But the lot of it left Prax bored. Where he had learned enough to pilot a mid-sized freighter across the belt- something he had never dreamed of- Prax knew he would never make even a passable mechanic.

 _“Hey Doc,”_ comes Amos’ voice over the comms. It’s static echoes across the open range of the cargo bay. _“You heading to the vault?”_

“No. Wasn’t planning on it,” Prax says, before thinking to ask, “Why?” Amos never made pointless conversation.

_“The snowdrops aren't looking too good.”_

“Since when?” Prax asks through the smile he can’t suppress. Part of him would never get over how the one and only Amos Burton, an Earther who could and would kill if need be and at a moments notice, let words like honeysuckle, daffodil, and snowdrop roll so tenderly off his tongue.

_“Since I’m looking at ‘em.”_

“I’ll be right there.”

* * *

Outside the cargo bay and through the walkways, not even the ceiling was spared. An overgrown canopy threading through the gridded lattice rises overhead. A wild thicket quietly rebelling against metal and alloy that neither Amos nor Mei would ever hear of trimming back. Prax brushes aside the dangling leaflets and budding nubs as he walks, the scent of pollen heavy in the air. The further the footfalls carry him, the denser and greener the vines grow ahead, pulling deeper into the ship towards the garden heart of the _Contorta_.

The vault doors slid open on command.

A rushing of the purest air aboard the ship doses over him. The UV light bleaches sunspots into his vision. It’s disorienting in it’s exhilaration. While their little flower vault had nothing on the glass gardens of Ganymede, it harbored a place in his heart deeper than anywhere else he had ever called home. He could walk it by memory alone, not pausing to regain his sight.

“Over here, Doc,” Amos is leaning over a planter tier near one of the corners of the hexagonal chamber. Prax can see him now, through the inflorescent clusters. Still dressed in his machine shop jumpsuit, soil from the gardens mixing in with the oil. “What took you so long?”

“I was in the cargo bay. Double checking the restraints.”

“I coulda done that.”

“If only I trusted you near all the shiny new toys and tools.”

That earned a smirk from Amos, which Prax took as confirmation enough that he was right. Prax had spent an entire night talking Amos down from a con job to steal the haul after it suddenly went missing.

“This the one you're worried about?” Prax kneels to the planter. The white petaled flower he finds droops headfirst, nearly doubled over, its delicate life withering away.

“It’s all wilted, see?”

“The others are just fine.” Prax observes, the nearby perennials standing green and firm.

“Yeah, but what about this one?” Amos presses. Because of course Amos couldn’t let anything green slip through his fingers, not without a fight. Or at least an explanation.

“The _Galanthus_ is a delicate but relisiant genus. They’re tricky to raise in low gravity. Even the best artificial light might not be enough. Sometimes they die mid-cycle before they propagate. But this one-” Prax reaches for a drawer, finding miniature forceps, pulls away a small brown bulb from the leaves of the flower. “Nothing to worry about. It lived a full cycle, just faster than we expected.”

“Just like that?” Amos whistles, something like relief on his breath.

“Well, there’s no accounting for intrinsic biological variability,” Prax promises.

Amos simply nods along, satisfied in all he did not need to understand.

“You really comm’d me down her for one little flower,” Prax muses, sighful and wondering.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Amos replies in all seriousness. And if Prax accidental brushes up against something prickly in his haste to kiss Amos, he considers it well worth it.

* * *

“I gotta get back to the machine shop,” Amos retreats down the opposing corridor. “The drive belts need retesting and it's your turn to make dinner.”

“We should trade,” Prax offers only half joking, following him out into the halls. “Mei would at least eat your cooking.”

“Nothing wrong with your cooking, Doc. And all you’d do is hurt yourself with a drill.”

“Can you at least explain to me why she insists on living off of ration bars like a rock hopper?”

“Any good belter loves the taste of recycled soy and oats.”

Prax would argue for the fiftieth time how Mei isn’t just any belter. That _tumang_ born Amos had more stereotypical makings of a _belta_ than any born into the Meng clan. That Mei’s medications required a balanced diet to work effectively. But Amos was already gone, swallowed up by the greenery. And Prax should have taken his leave, following the trumpet vine and the Dutchman’s pipe that traced out the path to the galley. But a flashing red light caught his eye.

A sensor filament, above the auxiliary box and the H2O readout. Water levels were flagging. Not dangerously so, but not within projected parameters. Prax runs his finger down the itemized conduit channels. Stops on the the usual culprit. Not the vines or the gardens or the vault, but his own little seedling.

* * *

“The water in my shower cut out!” is the first thing Mei shouts when she finds her father in the galley chopping mushrooms with magnetized cutlery. Said mushrooms were for her dinner, seeing as Prax knew for a fact that Mei had skipped breakfast and lunch to bury her head in AP Comm Labs and degree prep. Amos had sworn he’d convinced her to swallow half a ration bar before she returned to her half starved concentration but Prax was certain the two of them just took turns covering for each other. They had been faithfully indivisible for years.

“We’ll be in Ceres before the next night cycle. Amos knows the best H2O refiller. Pasta?” Prax offers, but she ignores him, circling the tabletop hub in what could only be called a _mood_.

“So I’m not gonna wash my hair until we dock? Gross, dad!” she pouts, turning her body with melodramatic gestures of her little body. For Belters the Meng family never quite stretched to the lithe builds reminiscent of their fellow nomadic class. Mei could almost be mistaken for Martian.

“Maybe the kitchen runoff will mix well with your shampoo?” Prax pushes a plate in front of her, pours sauteed fungi over the sauce and soybean pasta.

“Noodle water?!” she gripes in disgust.

“Mei, if you paid more attention to your water ration readout-” it's  a gentle admonishment. He’s rewarded with a foul look.

“I can hear you two in the mech shop,” Amos’ voice carries before he enters the room. He’s thickset and sweaty, his suspenders peeled off of him and hanging around his hips. His workshop must still be overheating, the ventilation functioning at low capacity. Prax had tried but wasn’t able to get Amos to seal off the sanctuary of his work den until they reached Ceres.

The two of them would be the death of Prax. Not that he could live without them.

“Arguing about food again?”

“Among other things,” Prax says, turns to Mei who is ignoring her plate and asks, “aren’t you hungry since your light lunch?”

“Sure. I had a ration bar.”

“Oh? How much of one?” Prax inquires innocently.

“A whole one,” Mei says with surly bravada.

“Really? because Amos said half,” and Prax knows he’s glaring at Amos but he can’t help it. Not that Amos even pretends to be chastised. Instead excuses himself of all parental duties that don’t involve being Mei’s favorite and prefered confidant and reaches for a plateful of dinner.

“Hands,” warns Prax. Amos forgets all to often; there’s a layer of dried oil slick to his fingers from his steamroom of a workshop. Amos obediently rinses it away down the kitchen drain, because as Alex Kamal had once said, ‘a chef should at least be respected in his own galley.’

“I’m not washing my hair with that,” Mei sulks, watching the sudsy oil slink away.

“Why would you?” Amos mumbles through a mouth already full of food.

“Dad won’t divert more water to my shower-”

“I never said that-”

“You are always so unfair-”

“I am asking you to be responsible with what we have-”

“You think everything has to be a big moral lesson-”

“-and how a little girl uses so much water is-”

“A little girl might not need so much water,” Amos smacks his lips, interrupting them both. He chugs a vaguely fruit flavored protein smoothie from the tube, “but a _little lady_ does.”

Mei sat up straight, prim and vindicated as Prax curled his shoulders forward, unable to look either of them in the eye as he took stock of the station-shattering revelation Amos so casually dropped into dinner conversation. Mei was nearing _thirteen_ . How had he forgotten that? She was so utterly different from the sick child who refused to be bedridden, toddling around Ganymede after him. The last trace of the frightened captive they had rescued on Io had eased and dissipated. She had been submitting degree prep work for months, outgrown half of her clothes, cultivated into a moodier and moodier terror over the past few months, and the significance of any of it had not sunk in until just now: Mei wasn’t a little a girl any longer. Worse, she wasn’t _his_ little girl.

“We can- we can factor that in-” Prax sputters.

“I can just give her some of my ration,” Amos supplies helpfully, relishing the grey-white mushroom sauce. “You and I always end up sharing anyway.”

Mei’s face wrinkles in revulsion. Clearly as appalled at the unsubtle implication of their shared shower usage as her father’s dreaded realization of her oncoming onslaught of pubescent hormones. While Amos punches in a reroute of water pressure with his hand terminal, Mei sulks off to her quarters to ruminate deeply on the matters of pyrrhic victories.

* * *

Amos often realizes far too late when Prax is too far gone to be reasoned with. That’s why later in their quarters he watches Prax pace back and forth, forgetting to reset the green panel watering system and deciding he really doesn’t care if every stem of foliage dies on the _Contorta_ when Amos reminds him.

“For fuck’s sake,” Amos swears, offended on behalf of the plants. “If you hate it that much, I could just talk to her for you.”

“Talk to her about what?”

“The _Sex Talk_ , Doc. What else?”

“No,” Prax’s stomach turns at the offer, his fears unquelled and growing. “I absolutely do not want that. In fact, I don’t want either of you speaking to each other, ever again.”

“That’s a little much, Doc, don’t you think?” It would have been deadpanned if Amos weren’t always so deadpan to begin with.

“Or is it not enough Amos? Tell me, are there any other literal life changing events I may have been missing?”

Amos remains silent. Prax really should have noticed.

“A parent has one chance to tackle the puberty monster with grace. And I just… just sailed blindly right past it.”

“Hmhmm.” Amos agrees.

“Like I plotted a course around it, navigating to dead space-”

“Hmhmm.” Amos hums again, moving Prax backwards by the shoulder. He sits mindlessly to the beside. Hardly even inhales.

“I couldn't have handled that worse.”

Amos nods and nods, pulling off Prax’s mag-boot. “Hmhmm.”

“I- I-” Prax searches, face flush and worried, “I just can't bear that anything might happen to her-”

“Hmhmm.” Amos has maneuvered Prax out of his pants but he barely notices.

“Now she’ll emancipate at sixteen and leave the ship and I’ll never see her again.”

“Hmhmm.”

“She’ll major in something ridiculous, like Interplanetary Civics or Earther history-” the thought is half hysterical, half maddening.

“Hmhmm.”

“Then I’ll be inconsolable and you’ll just vent me into space rather than deal with me.”

To that Amos gives a half musing chuckle, before nodding along. “Hmhmm.”

“Yeah this is it,” Prax frets. “It's all over from here… We survived a kidnapping and a war and botched scientific exploitation and- and _fuck-_ Nicola leaving us, but _this?_ There’s no coming back from this.”

Amos rolls his eyes, producing his own belt in one hand and undoing Prax’s shirt with the other with ambidextrous ease.

“...you could at least pretend to entertain my concerns,” Prax sulks before sinking back against the bed.

To that Amos smirks knowingly, “least we can tell where she gets her pout from,” before he flips Prax with intentional lack of grace. Prax squirms until Amos presses against the practiced site of particular favored lovebite, between his shoulder and his spine before Prax gets with the picture and gasps out in realization.

“Oh- we’re… Really, Amos? Now?”

Amos’ hand curls around Prax’s waist and closes firm around him. Prax’s head rolls back. “Just about, Doc,” his teeth at the tendous curve of Prax’s neck. It was harder to feel indignant as Amos grew harder in his own right, and if there was one thing Amos was good at- aside from machinery and street bartering and violence and turning negotiations into creative threats, it was making Prax’s brain go silent as a dead space.

Prax shivers as Amos kisses and tongues his way up Prax’s spine, a tongue in Prax’s ear with a cheeky, “unless you wanna go give Mei the birds and the bees speech instead?”

Prax groans, pushing Amos back and turning over to align their bodies. “You Earthers killed all the bees,” Prax accuses. And yes, maybe even pouts.

Amos doesn’t deny it, deciding that kissing Prax was more important than having the final say.

* * *

Later, in the heady still of their quarters filling in the sound of Amos’ earther lungs breathing heavy and content, Prax lies awake.

He’s so far from Ganymede. He could go to the cockpit, plot a course for it. But he could never really go back.

Its stranger still to think, he’s farther even from any real botanical hub or the use of his agro-sustainability doctorate. He’s learned to get by outside of the law, outside of academia. Knows enough to take apart a gun, almost enough to shoot straight. He’s a learned half decent pilot, well over his lifelong fears of shuttlecraft. Out of the war zones, safe from Mao-Kwik Mercantile airspace. A lifetime away from his marriage, from Nicola. Away from everything his own parents imagined for him as they scrimped and scoured to bring the best the Belt had to offer. The things his life had been and were supposed to be felt less and less a dream. Like a bad memory made worse by how little it mattered over time.

Perhaps one day looking out over the endless drift, Mei would feel this way too. About him and Amos and the _Contorta_.

Amos doesn't crack an eye open but mutters something vaguely threatening yet erotic about bedding Prax down again until he passes out.

Prax doesn’t answer, not at first, but then Amos tightens his hold around Prax’s waist and a stray realization sparks. “I shouldn’t pester her to eat more,” Prax signs. “She already has to worry about the medicine for the rest of her life. She can’t rebel against that... so we fight about food instead.”

“Now you’re gettin’ it, Doc.”

“You already knew. Of course you already knew.” Prax rolls to his side, props his head in his hands. “How can you be so calm about this? This isn't just her appetite or her illness. What are we gonna do when she starts asking questions? Real questions? About about Io and Katoa and Mao-?”

Amos opens his eyes. “She’s already asking.”

There’s a weight to the admission. A heavy as a cold leaden fist closing around Prax’s heart, shuttering the valves and strangling his breath. She had asked Amos. Not him.

“What did she want to know?” The voice belongs to Prax, but he doesn’t recognize it.

“About Strickland mostly. Why she never saw him again. She only remembered the good stuff about him. Wasn’t happy when I told her I killed him.”

“Amos-” because of course he wouldn't lie. Even when he should.

“She asked about her mother, too.”

“You never even met Nicola.” Prax sinks against Amos, defeated and sore. Amos wraps a hand around Prax’s, fingers grazing the veins of his wrist. It’s a simple touch. It’s nothing. It’s maybe the last thing grounding Prax from spinning away.

“Think she wanted to know what makes someone walk away. Walk away from the people they’re supposed to love. How they do it without a gun to their head.”

Prax closes his eyes. “What did you tell her?”

“That I didn’t know shit about her mother. But that wasn’t what she was really trying to ask me about. So I told her,” Amos leans into Prax, forcing him to open up, to look at him, “she could pick every fight she wanted to, for the rest of her life and her daddy would never walk away from her. He fought too hard to get her back.”

Amos’ tone is level, conversational. They may as well be talking about the weather on Mars. And that’s what frightens Prax most. How natural it was to him to size up anything and anyone. Slicing deep into the heart of their vulnerability. No lie they could tell themselves would ever be safe from Amos.

But, Prax decides, swallowing hard and nestling against the Earther’s body heat, there is also a safety in that.

“She’s gonna be fine,” Amos swears against his shoulder.

Prax’s voice is thick, exhausted. “How can you be so sure?”

“She has you, doesn't she?”

And Prax would protest, but he’s being turned in the other man’s hands, laid back with a gentleness that Prax is sure Amos learned from him. From Mei. He levels a sleepsoaked look into the Belter’s eyes as daring him to argue. And he can’t.

Prax doesn’t sleep any better. But he does sleep. And as always, it’s thanks to Amos.

 

 

 

fin.

**Author's Note:**

> Also inspired by my 101 Shots challenge, prompt #91: Snowdrop.


End file.
